O’Neal interrupted. “You have no wife. No life. You’re a spy, an enemy agent of a foreign power. Everything you had, your wife, your job, your home—it’s gone. It never was.”
For a moment, Mark felt like he was going to laugh. That was all he could do in the face of this epic farce, after all. Laugh, and uncontrollably at that. But as quickly as the urge arose, Mark felt it disappear. The room began to spin. Words began to echo in his mind. Spy. Enemy. In a way, O’Neal was right—Mark did have a life that wasn’t his, only the grizzled agent had it backward. Whatever this spy thing was, Mark knew, obviously, that it was all a lie—but based on everything he’d been through today and the look on O’Neal’s face, this wasn’t a joke. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Mark couldn’t think of a way to talk himself out of a situation. His words, his greatest asset, wouldn’t be enough to save him. The realization terrified him more than anything else that’d happened through the entire ordeal.
“I—no. No!” Mark yelled, lunging forward in his chair. The handcuffs scraped against his wrists, tearing away layers of skin. “Spy? Spy?! Listen to me. Listen! This is a mistake. You’ve made a mistake. Just, please, let me talk to Sarah. I can fix this!”
O’Neal’s face remained impassive. He got out of his chair and grasped Mark’s shoulder as he spoke directly in his ear: “Mark, or whatever your real name is, you can drop the act. Everyone else did. The only thing you’re getting is a one-way ticket out of here.”
“Ticket? Ticket to where?” Mark thrashed in his chair, causing the abrasions in his wrist to deepen. He turned to O’Neal, catching him just as he was about to leave the room. “Tell me where you’re sending me!”
O’Neal turned to look back one last time. “Home, of course. Agent transfer. We’re sending you back to Russia.”
Mark screamed. He fought against his restraints, tensing every muscle in his body as he pulled with all his strength, desperately trying to break himself free. In his mind, he was tearing the bolts that held his chair down right out of the floor. But that didn’t happen. He screamed and thrashed, deepening the wounds in his wrists and causing fresh lacerations around his ankles. And he was so lost in his resistance that he didn’t even notice the two guards enter the room from the door behind him. Mark only realized their presence when he was shocked by a Taser for the second time. His muscle control fled his body just like before, leaving Mark paralyzed in the chair. The fight he’d put up, however futile it was, was over.
The black hood came down again, and for the second time Mark’s world went black.
PART TWO
10
Sarah stood by the windows, feeling numb to everything around her. The world she saw with her eyes and could touch with her hands seemed immaterial; as she stared impassively at the curtains that covered her living room windows, Sarah found herself nearly convinced that if she reached out her hand and disturbed the maroon fabric that hung from the garishly ornate rod and nearly to the floor, reality as she knew it would simply fall away. The world around her would then reflect how she felt: like she was falling through a depthless, black abyss, screaming without sound as she plunged down, down, down. Sarah reached out more than once and, with a stuttered breath, stopped short of making contact with her surroundings for fear that it might all come undone—even more than it already had.
But Sarah knew that was impossible. Despite the shock of the past twenty-four hours, she still had her pragmatic brain, which was working overtime to keep her sane. Sarah knew, despite the sheer lunacy of it all, what was real and what was not. Mark was her husband. Mark was a D.C. lobbyist.
Mark was not a Russian spy.
Sarah also knew that if she tugged on the curtains that opened to her postage stamp–sized front lawn, the only thing she’d see was the outside world. Same as it was yesterday, same as it’d be tomorrow. The problem was that Sarah wanted nothing to do with the thing that’d somehow come to be known as reality. Because in reality, she’d shove aside her curtains and be exposed to a world where pitch-black helicopters roamed the skies overhead; where police barricades stood resolutely at each end of her block; where police officers, hands holding the butts of their guns, patrolled up and down the street. It made her feel like she was living in some kind of dystopian military state. Even more unnerving were the bloodsuckers that were camped out in front of her building waiting for a drop of blood—in the form of a glimpse of Sarah—to splash into their water. Sarah spotted only a slice of the esteemed press corps in the narrow slit between two of her curtains, but it was enough. Reporters and their film crews lazed about the front lawn, cameras and microphones at the ready, though Sarah could hardly fathom what they were hoping for. A picture of her? What would that prove or add to their story? Judging by what she’d seen on the news so far, not a single outlet was interested in that pesky little matter of the truth. If any of these so-called reporters bothered doing the slightest bit of research, they’d see what a sham the allegations against Mark were. Instead, they were wasting time on her lawn, chomping for their chance to harass the wife of an alleged American traitor. The truth would just have to wait, apparently.
Not for Sarah, though. While it still made her head spin to recall the events of the past day, she couldn’t help herself from playing them over and over in her mind, trying to remember an overlooked detail that would shed light on what was actually happening or puzzle together what she knew into a more coherent whole.
First, Sarah recalled, came the federal goons in black suits who interrogated her for hours. Were they CIA? NSA? In all the time they took asking Sarah questions they seemed to already know the answers to, they never identified themselves. Did Sarah know Mark was a Russian spy? Did she know the other members of his espionage ring? Did she notice anything suspicious about his behavior? Did he have any unusual technology in their house, any items he tried to keep hidden from her? No. No. No. No. They asked her the same questions over and over, varying the sequence, changing the delivery, modifying a word or two. If their aim was to disorient her, they didn’t need to try so hard; their colleagues had violently ripped her husband out of their home, draping a black hood over his head while physically restraining her. They violated her sense of security and, even more traumatizing, tried to confuse her into accepting a reality she knew was a complete fiction. But who’s weaving this narrative? Sarah wondered as the goons pressed their questions. Sarah knew Mark had enemies—all lobbyists do—but was there one out there powerful and vindictive enough to have Mark declared an enemy of the state? Just the idea of such a bitter vendetta made Sarah tremble; after all, if Mark did have this kind of enemy out there, who knew what else he or she was capable of—or if this was the culmination of their plans, or just the beginning.
By the time the nameless goons finished their circuitous questioning, dusk was falling; Sarah looked out her windows and saw the golden sunset hovering over the bare branches that stretched from the poplar in front of her home. She noticed that the front door, which was bashed off its hinges when the raid began, had been neatly replaced. Like nothing had happened. Like armed men hadn’t erupted into her life and stolen her husband as she helplessly watched. Sarah unlocked and locked the door at least ten times, trying to will herself to believe that the dead bolt mattered. That she could feel safe within her own home. It was an unconvincing exercise.
The news of Mark’s abduction—Sarah couldn’t stomach the term “arrest” to properly describe what happened—broke at nightfall. At the time, Sarah was sitting on her couch in the living room, gripping her phone in one hand and the bat she used in her summer softball leagues in the other. She hadn’t spoken to anyone about what had happened; she didn’t even know how. What would she tell her parents? That her husband, their son-in-law, had been ripped from their home on allegations of being a Russian spy? It didn’t even make sense. She didn’t know where Mark was, didn’t know if what the goons or that agent O’Neal had said was even true. And while she tried her hardest t
o push the thought from her mind, she didn’t even know if Mark was alive. More than once she considered the possibility that what she’d been told were lies—well, she knew they were lies, and that Mark’s captors also knew they were lies—and this was all an elaborate cover for something else. Sarah considered calling the D.C. police, but even that seemed futile; there was no one to trust, no one who could make sense of this living nightmare. As much as Sarah considered the worst outcome of what had happened, she also envisioned the best—that someone would realize the hideous mistake that’d been made, and Mark would walk through their front door, worse for the wear but with a hell of a story to tell at dinner parties.
Those hopes were dashed the moment her phone began to vibrate in her grasp. Sarah jolted upright on the couch at the intrusive alert. Up to that point, she had been ensconced in a bubble of silence. The TV was off and she hadn’t received a single call or text all day. Then, suddenly, her phone was thrown into a fit of spasms without end. Her text and email tones—the nauseating stock chime that she perpetually vowed to change—hardly had time to fully ding before another alert came rushing in. Dozens of messages all asking the same two questions: What happened to Mark? Are you okay? In that order—first the dirt, then the concern. Chime after chime after chime. And when Sarah ignored the messages—many of them coming from people she hardly spoke to, hadn’t spoken to in years, or flat out didn’t even know—the phone started to ring. Sarah ignored every call. Her boss, her brother, even her best friend. She wasn’t prepared to talk about what had happened, not without bursting into a screaming rage or collapsing into a fit of tears. There was no time for either; Mark was out there, somewhere, and she had to hold her shit together in case he needed her. Wherever he was, whatever she needed to do to get him back home to her, Sarah was ready to do it.
The only text Sarah sent was to her parents. Sarah knew how crippled with fear and anxiety they’d be, and she didn’t want them to be distraught on her account. To assuage their nerves, Sarah told them it was all a misunderstanding, that it would be worked out soon. And she urged them to keep her message to themselves. Sarah was aware of their love of forwarding messages, however banal, factual, or relevant, to their entire contact lists. For the time being, Sarah preferred, profoundly, to keep this situation close to the chest—which was impossible, considering.
As the barrage of texts, emails, and calls continued unabated, Sarah finally worked up the nerve to flip on her TV, cringing as she did, to find out what was being said about Mark. News of his arrest, and his role as a saboteur, had to be what sparked all the attention Sarah was now the victim of. It relieved her, in a way. At least Mark hitting the news cycle gave credibility to everything that had happened.
Even though she knew it was all but impossible, Sarah tried to filter her news to weed out partisan propaganda. She wasn’t a news junkie like Mark, so her investment in the networks warring over which claimed the truth most accurately didn’t mean that much to her, but in this case, she needed information that was, she truly hoped, as accurate as possible. But as she turned on the station she trusted most, it quickly became evident that they were guilty of being just another avenue for pumping out whatever information was fed to them without even blinking an eye—or, better yet, verifying the validity of what they’d been told. Because what she saw and heard painted Mark as an enemy combatant determined to dismantle the very structure of American democracy. They spoke of him like he’d not only been accused, but also tried and convicted.
In the first segment Sarah caught, an unreasonably sexy anchor lobbed softball questions to an intelligence “expert”—his credentials were never made clear—who explained how domestic spies—sleeper agents, he said, again and again—were so prevalent on American soil that it was almost commonplace. The reason Mark’s case was so shocking, apparently, was because he was an American-born citizen who had abandoned his allegiance to the United States in favor of Mother Russia. Sarah’s heart, which had been tumbling around her chest since turning on the TV, sunk down into the pit of her stomach when this expert speculated that Mark’s turn came during a semester abroad in Russia while in college—an excursion Sarah knew never happened. They’d been friends since their sophomore year, when they were neighbors in a dingy apartment complex on the south end of Duke’s campus; while they didn’t get involved romantically until after graduation, Sarah was acquainted with Mark’s life enough to know he had never gone to Russia. Mark studied, he played football, and he worked on a loading dock near his house every summer. That was it. This excursion to Russia was an absolute fabrication that was being passed off as truth to millions of people. It made Sarah sick.
Reality never felt so tenuous, and Sarah had to pinch the corners of her eyes to keep her head from spinning. Who was filling Mark’s life with fiction? And why?
Sarah was snapped back to the present by the sound of a growing clamor outside her window. She separated the curtains enough to see that the reporters’ attention was no longer affixed to her window; instead, the bloodsuckers were flocking to her front staircase, mobbing someone who was trying to walk up her stairs. The tight swarm of paparazzi blocked her view, so she couldn’t see who was trying to make their way into her building. The person had to be determined, though, and a touch crazy to fully expose themselves to the media vultures just to get to her front door. The doorbell rang, a shrill buzzing that sounded like an air raid siren. Sarah was startled by the noise even though she knew to expect it. Her nerves were beyond shot.
Though just a few steps separated Sarah from her front door, it seemed so much farther. Her paces slow and calculated, she stalked forward like a hunter angling in on a deer. The grip on her baseball bat couldn’t have been tighter. In her mind, the door was just waiting to crack open again. Its permeability was her new normal, and she couldn’t imagine that changing for a long, long time.
Choking down her fear, Sarah willed herself close enough to the door so she could reach the adjacent intercom. She pressed the talk button—“Who is it?” she calmly asked, but when the reply came in, all she could hear was the cacophonous chatter of one reporter after another shouting questions at whoever was at the door. Sarah’s instincts screamed for her to ignore whoever was looking to enter her home. But the idea of having someone to talk to, someone who could help make sense of the madness engulfing her, was hard to resist. And after all, whoever this person was, they obviously weren’t there in an official capacity; they weren’t there to question, harass, or arrest her. If they had been, Sarah learned, they wouldn’t buzz. They’d just enter.
Steeling herself with a deep breath, Sarah jammed her finger into the buzzer and opened the complex’s door. After flipping over the dead bolt, Sarah took a half-dozen steps back and raised the bat in a slugging position. She gripped its handle and mentally prepared herself to attack if whoever came through her front door, whoever entered her home, was someone she didn’t like.
The doorknob clicked, and Sarah twisted her fingers around the bat’s worn rubber; she was ready.
Every muscle in her body relaxed, though, when Aaron entered. He recoiled at the sight of Sarah, falling back against the closed door. After all, Sarah was standing just a few feet away, ready to crack his skull open with an aluminum baseball bat. “Jesus!” he yelled.
“Oh, thank God,” Sarah said as she lowered the bat. She realized she must have looked like a maniac; not only because of the bat she wielded, but also the wide-eyed stare that’d been locked on her face.
“What the hell is going on, Sarah?” Aaron asked, confusion and shock lacing his words.
Sarah dropped the bat onto the couch. She gripped the back as she tried to decide where to even start. “I have no idea,” she said. “It isn’t true. None of it is true.”
“I know, I know,” Aaron said, and he started to rub Sarah’s back. She recoiled at the contact, and Aaron immediately pulled his hand away. “Sorry—sorry,” he said, and Sarah could tell he meant it. Mark hated Aaron, but he didn�
��t know him the way Sarah did. Sure, he could be loud and obnoxious, but it was all a front that masked his deep insecurities and anxiety. And, truth be told, he sometimes acted even crasser than normal just to piss Mark off. Still, despite all of it, Sarah knew Aaron was a good person, and a good friend. If anyone had to be with her right now, she was glad it was him. “I’m going to go and get you a cup of tea or something.” Aaron continued, “You’re a little on edge. When I get back, you can start at the beginning.”
Sarah nodded, and Aaron disappeared into the kitchen. She then flopped down on the couch, and released a deep breath. It felt like her entire body was exhaling, and she let her eyelids close. She blinked once, twice, and was sound asleep.
* * *
When Sarah woke up it was still nighttime. Aaron was facing the curtains, entranced by the spectacle right outside her door.
“I’m guessing they haven’t left yet,” she said as she used the back of her hand to wipe off the little bit of drool that had slid down the side of her mouth while she was asleep.
“There was a shift change, but that’s it,” Aaron replied.
He turned away from the view and sat on the armchair opposite Sarah. She was used to Mark sitting in that chair, and when he did, he filled it out. His muscular frame, wide hips, and broad shoulders covered the chair’s lavender fabric backing, whereas Aaron’s frame allowed for the light purple coloring to poke out on both sides. Mark also sat differently; he opened up on the chair, spreading his legs and pushing his back into the fabric like he was demanding the seat to accommodate him; Aaron, on the other hand, folded one leg over another, and he sat with a bit of a hunch in his posture, like he was cold and needed to huddle for warmth. While Sarah was thankful Aaron was there and she appreciated him exposing himself to the media—she could see the footage of him pushing into her house in her mind, accompanied by a tawdry headline, “Enemy Sympathizer?” or something of the sort—his presence, and the way it screamed how unlike Mark he was, only made her miss her husband even more.
The Throwaway Page 8
